Review; Bleeding Violet

Attention, this ones a bit of a rambler. I appolize for all the "negative" reviews lately, but I'm going to continue speeking my mind because I know I like an honest review :) 

Author; Dia Reeves

Review;  2/5

Release Date; January 5^th 2010

Product Description from Goodreads

Love can be a dangerous thing....

Hanna simply wants to be loved. With a head plagued by hallucinations, a medicine cabinet full of pills, and a closet stuffed with frilly, violet dresses, Hanna's tired of being the outcast, the weird girl, the freak. So she runs away to Portero, Texas in search of a new home.

But Portero is a stranger town than Hanna expects. As she tries to make a place for herself, she discovers dark secrets that would terrify any normal soul. Good thing for Hanna, she's far from normal. As this crazy girl meets an even crazier town, only two things are certain: Anything can happen and no one is safe.

Review;

            Wow. What an odd, odd, read.

Odd, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, sometimes it is refreshing to read “odd” books, in fact I would probably classify some of my favorite books as “odd”. However, Bleeding Violet, definitely was not my kind of book.

Once you get pass the oddity of the world Hanna lives in, and I’m not talking about her manic depression and hallucinations, but more of the mindset she lives in. Her mother is quite… different; she doesn’t want Hanna, and hits her and constantly tells her to leave, but in Hanna’s mind she just needs to be bashed over the head with a lamp (which she does by the way) and she’ll come around. 

Another thing I didn’t like was the way this book would casually mention dark subjects and make them light, such as; drugs, ditching school, suicide, murder, prostitution, and the thing I was most shocked with in a YA book was the way the author portrayed the loose morals of Hanna towards sex.  Now I am not generally opposed to sex in YA novels if it is tastefully done and not overly mentioned, but that is not the case in this book. Hanna, who readers learn lost her virginity when she was 14 to a stranger in a sauna, views sex as a way to get protection and become popular in her new town, and the most shocking thing is her “mother” not only condones it but also encourages it!  I can understand this in a more “adult” book, after all we expect that in books geared at an older audience, but I don’t like seeing that in a book aimed for 13 year olds and up. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think sex should be taught so loosely to impressionable teens. Heck I think I’m still impressionable at 20 and it shocked me!!!

If I get passed the whole sex issue, I had no connections with the characters. I though Hanna was a little well…. Strange. And it wasn’t because of her mental state but more because of her morals and ideals, which I know, were probably a result of her sanity but still I couldn’t connect. I even hated the main guy, Wyatt. Usually  authors writes most of the love interests to be totally absorbed in the main character and be an at times slightly misogynistic, tough-guys, Reeves wrote Wyatt as being a big demon hunter and while it seemed he truly liked Hanna, whenever his ex girlfriend was around he would make goo-goo eyes at her. WHAT THE HECK?! As my mother always said; “no one buys the cow, when they get the milk for free”.

I must admit, I couldn’t finish this book. I had about 100 pages left and decided I just couldn’t do it. This saddens me because I hate feeling regretful at buying a book, and even worse feeling like I wasted my time. However since I never finished maybe the book ends off with a bang making the beginning and middle worth it?